Saturday, 28 February 2015

"The Device" - UK DVD review

Got an advanced look at Jeremy Berg’s upcoming sci-fi thriller “The Device”, which is coming to UK DVD at the end of March.

The film largely revolves around young couple Abby (Angela DeMarco) and her partner Calvin (David S Hogan), who are meeting up with her estranged sister Rebecca (Kate Alden) for the first time in many years. Having separated following some sort of childhood trauma, they’re trying to patch things up, with the help of Abby’s boyfriend, by heading back to their mothers old cabin for a weekend.

Wandering out into the woods, the 2 girls come across what looks like some strange crash wreckage, amongst which one of them finds a mysterious looking black ball. Taking the object with them, strange things subsequently happen. Rebecca starts giving out cryptic messages in her sleep, Calvin starts getting strange headaches and Abby starts having strange dreams about aliens and then discovers she is pregnant, despite Calvin apparently being infertile. And well, that’s about it really…

All these incidents seem to be somehow connected to the strange black ball they found earlier, which does seem to have a mind of its own. But you never really do find out what its about or whether this whole incident does have some sort of alien connection, or whether everyone is just going barmy. Indeed, it was almost like watching an exceptionally slow episode of “The X-Files” (which the director was clearly a fan of, seeing as he mentions it in the script).

Directed by Jeremy Berg, who also gave us “The Invoking”, whilst the film benefits from a cast that can actually act (unlike so many low budget films of this nature), the plot is, sadly, painfully slow and lacks any proper conclusion. If you liked “The X-Files”, you may enjoy this. But mainstream horror fans may find this a tad slow.

The disc contains 3x commentary tracks. The first with director Jeremy Berg, producer Matt Medisch and writer John Poratnova. The second with actors Angela DeMarco, Kate Alden and David Hogan and the third one writer John Portanova and Tracey Torme, scriptwriter of several alien abduction films.